Once on a Moonless Night

by Dai Sijie

  “The six other people on board—a pilot, two co-pilots, the two officers and the sumo—died during the war without leaving any testimony about the incident which happened inside the plane when Puyi, gripped with sudden madness, opened the cabin door in mid-air and threw out torn shreds of various works of art.

  “Puyi had never flown before, notes Li Ping, a specialist of the Sino-Japanese War, in an article published in the twenty-third edition of the magazine History, and was taken to a dirty, cramped aircraft intended for transporting freight. It was chosen deliberately by Japanese generals for its sorry appearance and, more particularly, its poor state of repair, as a way of thoroughly duping the Chinese administration, a fact revealed by the few documents concerning the future emperor of Manchuria’s camouflaged departure. In Memoirs of a Japanese Colonel, which I was lucky enough to buy for a handful of coins from a second-hand bookseller in Kyoto, the author relates, among other things and with supporting photographs, how his own nerves were sorely tested the day he had to take one of these planes that were kept for secret missions, in order to get out of Mongolia. Take-off was delayed and the pilot had to get down from the cockpit, find a long bamboo ladder, lean it against the plane, climb up it and wipe the cabin windscreen by hand, because it was too dirty to begin such a long journey. No one knows whether Puyi was subjected to similar inconveniences, but the state of the plane, I’m quite sure, heightened his fear and exerted such pressure on his already disturbed mind that it brought on a fit of hysteria. According to Li Ping, the violent jolting like a constant earthquake under his seat, and the whining motor like a siren announcing the end of the world, along with his loneliness and the feeling of being held captive by brutal creatures exhaling their steaming breath over his face, shouting and playing childish games, laughing at obscene jokes, one cruel jibe leading to another, not that he could understand a single word—all of these elements combined to induce another mental breakdown.

  “The causes of the incident have raised little if any controversy. Some of his contemporaries attributed it to a rush of arrogance on Puyi’s part, humiliated to be travelling in that ugly little freight plane, or even a final patriotic reflex, an indication of his self-loathing for failing to reject the idea of resuming the imperial throne, even if only as a puppet for the Japanese. At various symposia I discussed it with other, more sceptical specialists who felt Puyi’s gesture was a tad too spectacular, as if he were trying to leave an image of himself as an emperor who, even after his downfall, would not collaborate without rebelling, and this very attitude meant he was actually more than a collaborator, he doubly collaborated.”

  As the professor explained his colleagues’ opinions to me, we arrived at his house and went into a small dark room, which served as dining room, sitting room, kitchen and study all at once. He lit the gas hob with a plastic gun and started making tea next to a sink filled with a teetering iceberg of filthy washing-up.

  “One of my former students works at the Party Central Committee Archives where, as you know, they keep all documents classed as ‘state secrets.’ One time, in this very room, when we were talking about drug use in China, she mentioned a file relating to Puyi, which she came across by chance when she was filing archive material. This came as a surprise to me, because I thought she catalogued only documents about the Party. She recited from memory a few pages from an interrogation which took place in a Manchurian prison in 1954. It was the first time I had heard this version of the facts and, while I made notes, I prayed silently that there would be no gaps in her recollections. But she accomplished quite a feat and earned my respect. How precious they are, people with the prodigious gift of memory, who can record things in their heads, like the three-hundred-page book by Dmitri Shostakovich, which was banned but later published by one of his pupils, who made it through to the West and found all those quantities of words written by his master still anchored inside his head. I shall read you an extract of the notes I made:

  INTERROGATOR B: Prisoner, can you describe for us the plane that took you to the site of your betrayal? And don’t try and make the same mistake you made in the last interrogation: when talking about yourself, you won’t say “the fallen emperor” or put all your verbs in the third person, you’ll just say “I” like everyone else.

  PRISONER: I don’t remember it clearly any more, either the shape of it or the interior. I felt as if I were in a different world, not on this earth, less still in heaven, but in a world I didn’t know and which I don’t really remember. I do recall certain sounds and sensations, smells, images, but very few of the thoughts that came into my head that day, and even less of what they might have meant. I think we stayed in the plane on the ground for quite a long time, until it started to rain. But I couldn’t hear any sound, as if I were deaf. Through the open cabin door I could see the rain falling on the dusty runway, on the wings of the plane, harder and harder. Suddenly a colossal silhouette appeared at the end of the runway, looming out of nowhere and slicing through the rain carrying a chest wrapped in wet cloth in each hand. He ran over to the plane, and his feet—I’ll never forget this, he was wearing white flat-heeled thonged sandals—his feet now looked tiny in the middle of a huge raindrop, which fell slowly and made a great puddle on the ground all by itself, silently splashing his white skin and the ivory gleam of his sandals. First one then the other, his feet stepped into another raindrop, just as big as the first one, and it made me laugh, but when I got up to go to the door the vision vanished. Sound came back to my ears. The sumo was at the foot of the plane, bowing and smiling at me as he held out the two chests as though in some ridiculous theatrical performance or to celebrate a victory, but I couldn’t remember what he was bringing me or why. I think I had lost my memory. The sumo handed the two chests to the officers inside the plane. But he didn’t get in straight away. He stayed where he was, speechless, possibly humiliated because I hadn’t recognised him. A temporary lapse, but its intensity terrified him because he knew from experience that memory loss often heralded death. To avoid dirtying the gangway, even though it was well rusted, he took off his sandals and climbed up the steps, which rocked beneath his weight. Once again I couldn’t resist the urge to laugh as I saw his bare feet coming towards me, shrunken like two expertly sculpted miniatures, held in a single drop of rain as it fell on the steps, and that wading sound, psh psh psh, echoing round … I suddenly realised the significance of the situation: those raindrops were tears shed by Heaven for the last seconds of the last emperor of China, a farewell; so I reached my arms outside, and the drops splashed thrillingly over my hands, laden with a sadness that chilled me to the bone.

  INTERROGATOR B: Superstitious nonsense! Listen to me, prisoner, make an effort to confess your crimes without any of your propaganda for reactionary superstitions! All that’s been wiped out by the great Chinese people.

  PRISONER: I acknowledge my crime, comrade interrogator, and I swear I will not re-offend.

  INTERROGATOR A: In your opinion, was this hallucination you’ve described the symptom of an illness such as schizophrenia, or the effect of a drug, opium, for example?

  PRISONER: I’m not an opium addict, sir.

  INTERROGATOR A: Perhaps the Japanese drugged you? Gave you an injection claiming it would calm you down? Or some pill for travel sickness? Tell the truth. This detail could mitigate your guilt.

  PRISONER: No injections … or pills … Wait, I do remember something. I can see an officer handing me a bottle. It was in the car on the way to the airfield.

  INTERROGATOR A: What sort of bottle?

  PRISONER: The glass was matt, very opaque, with a white vapour inside, which I breathed through a straw as if drinking it.

  INTERROGATOR A: Probably “ice” as the Americans call it, “crystal.” The more fanatical doctors in the Japanese army gave astronomical amounts of it to kamikaze pilots at the end of the war before they crashed themselves into American ships. Go on.

  PRISONER: The rain stopped shortly before we took off
. We reached a certain altitude, but the pilot couldn’t get the plane to go any higher; it was shaking so much I thought it would explode, and I held on to the sumo’s arm as I looked down through the window at the town of Tianjin, which I was probably seeing for the last time in my life. I told myself all those tiny black dots milling about in every direction, smaller than ants, that they were Chinese people who were my enemies now. Then we flew parallel to the coast of the Eastern Sea before cutting northwards. Ships, fishing boats, a couple of little islands appeared, framed by the window, then vanished. Then we were wrapped in thick fog, which looked as if it had come from the depths of the sea. Despite our low altitude I could hardly see anything now, except the dark silhouettes of a funeral procession. I couldn’t make out the musicians, but the music drifted up to me in snatches and tears of nostalgia clouded my eyes. When the fog dispersed, I saw the faint outline of a river mouth beneath us and the riverbed flooded by the high tide, with the funeral procession winding its way along it, crossing a bridge so insubstantial it almost wasn’t there, ephemeral, ready to vanish into thin air at any minute. The sight of it revived memories of my thwarted experiences as an artist, because painting would have meant that, with a few swift brushstrokes, I could have captured this devastating image of death, this burial of my Chinese identity, which was apparently being celebrated before my eyes. Long after it disappeared, the funeral tune—a strident, almost vulgar air—stayed with me like a melancholy obsession, so insistent that, when the sumo opened the chests and I looked through the purest masterpieces in the imperial collection—I’m sorry, in my collection—which were going to travel all the way to Manchuria with me, all I could see was the funeral procession with its black and white banners rippling in the wind, shrouded in autumn mists. Most of the rolls were not very large and I personally opened a work by Huizong chosen at random, unrolling it a section at a time. One by one birds spread their wings before my eyes, but, all of a sudden, the roll slipped from my hand and fell. Not that the jolting of the plane was too violent, or that the roll was weighed down by the tears I couldn’t help shedding. No. But a long, long snake had sprung from the depths of the clouds and smacked against the misted window in mid-air. I wanted to get a closer look at it, but it melted away and it was only when the sun broke through the low cloud that I saw it again, stretched out beneath us, dead, or nearly, its black dragon’s jaws opened to the shimmering sea, paralysed in its final agony, swept away by the tide. I watched that snake in terror; its heart had stopped beating but the body still displayed all its arching beauty in the sinuous trajectory winding through the mountains, or rather in a thousand and one trajectories, in arcs and spirals, sometimes in loops, until together they formed the biggest and most mysterious question mark in the world: The Great Wall of China. The contours of the wall quivered slightly, making it look as if it were squirming, suffering, a reptile smeared with saliva, unable to sleep until it was sated. That was when I picked up a roll of manuscript, written in an unknown language; I went over to the sliding door and opened it. A gust of wind snatched my glasses. My hands were so weak I had to tear the roll with my teeth, into two pieces initially, but before I could tear it further I saw the reptile, its rings paler than before, springing once more from the depths of a cloud, and I threw the two halves of the manuscript at it. Just as it raised its hideous head to take this sacred food in its gaping jaws, I noticed its uneven grey teeth, some long and pointed, others as small as the teeth of a saw. The monster hurled itself at me, wrapped itself round me from head to foot, squeezing me so tightly that its icy scales punctured my skin. When I regained consciousness, I don’t know how much later, I was lying on my seat, still shaking from the experience. Under the implacable watchful eyes of the two officers, the sumo was picking up what was left of the mutilated roll, in other words the strip of silk bearing the colophon written by Huizong, and the valuable shafts it was rolled on, made of white sandalwood, jade and ivory.”

  2

  THE PERIPATETIC EXISTENCE OF THIS mutilated scroll, although captivating, would have remained insurmountably removed from me, like the earth from the sky, had I not met Tumchooq a few months earlier in a certain Little India Street. This street, which had nothing Indian about it, partly justified its name: it really was very little, barely six metres wide. Every time two lorries crossed they toyed with catastrophe: there were horn-blowing duels, exchanges of cursing and insults, but mostly a test of each drivers determination with neither prepared to yield a whisker. Little India Street was to the west of my university, running alongside the grey bricks of the campus, sketching a gentle slope and lined with small shops: a grocer, a baker, the Zhang sisters’ haberdashery, a tailor, a traditional pharmacy, which wafted aniseedy smells of bark, dried herbs, cinnamon and musk and which had big glass jars on the counter with snakes coiled inside them bathed in greenish alcohol, ophidians imprisoned in the land-locked sea of those jars, the geometric patterns of their faded skins almost completely lost. At the top of the slope, in once white stone blackened by smoke and dust, was a statue of Mao in a raincoat that flapped in the east wind to symbolise political storms, while, perched limply on his head, was a Lenin hat with a visor in proportion to the size of his head, so large that one day a nest of straw and twigs caked in saliva and gastric juices appeared on it, complete with a swallow on a clutch of eggs. From the full height of its twelve metres the statue overlooked a clump of ugly single-storey administrative buildings: a police station from which the occasional isolated cry of despair could be heard as if from a psychiatric asylum; a post office where my grant arrived at the end of each month, a postal order for a pitiful sum; a small hospital; the Revolutionary Council where public records were registered, a haunting, sinister place I sometimes visited in my dreams, where I was married, registered the birth of my child, and where my death certificate was presented; the Peoples Bank; the Peoples Militia; the Community Arts Centre; a former library converted into a hall for political studies; and the premises of the Party Committee and the Communist Youth. The profane swallow that appeared on Mao’s cap was shot and her nest destroyed. The anti-revolutionary trails of saliva and white droppings that had covered one of his ears, carving a diagonal torrent across his face and streaming untactfully all the way to the leaders astonishingly prominent chin, were meticulously cleaned, but, if the rumours are to be believed, the swallows ghost, slightly smaller than the live bird, as if shrunken in death, zig-zagged across the sky at night, even in winter, making piercing, mournful sounds like the shriek of a rusted saw, tormenting the ears of insomniacs.

  After this political high point, Little India Street started on a downward slope as gentle as its rise. Two modest restaurants stood facing each other: The Peking Kitchen to the right with a menu that horrified me (grilled scorpions, pan-fried pig intestines …) and The Capital’s Kitchen on the left with grilled scorpions, steamed pig intestines …; next came a shop selling salt, soy sauce and vinegar; a butcher; a cleaners; a bookshop; a little bicycle-repair stall; and at the end of the street, where it met the main road into the centre of Peking, between two shops which owed their prosperity to ration tickets sold on the black market, was a greengrocers.

  At nightfall this shop was the site of a strange ritual, which I would surely never have noticed if a spring shower had not interrupted my evening stroll one day in 1978, forcing me to shelter under the bicycle-repair man’s awning. At seven o’clock the shop selling alcohol was the first to close, then the tobacconist and the bookshop. I watched the lights dancing through the rain and going out one by one, like a fluorescent millipede gradually being swallowed up by the darkness before disappearing altogether. The bicycle-repair man, with his pipe in the corner of his mouth, was spinning a wheel in the air, listening for any resistance.

  On the other side of the street the greengrocer’s, which was usually so ordinary, attracted my attention with its inexplicable goings-on. At first sight, the small, hunched salesmen looked like a group of schoolboys sitting in a classr
oom, but, on closer inspection, they made you shudder. They were unusually short, sitting in the harsh light of the bare bulb hanging from the ceiling, and had faces that seemed a hundred years old, their features hollow and furrowed like masks sculpted in rock. I’d be frightened of going into that place, I thought, among all those men with their wild eyes, the salesmen wearing butchers’ white aprons and the deliverymen dirty blue ones, looking like something straight out of an annual meeting for some crime syndicate. They sat holding their breath, all eyes on a man in glasses, the youngest of them (perhaps the only one who could count and write?). Standing under the bare light bulb, he opened a drawer and took out handfuls of banknotes and coins, piled them on a table and started counting them. He behaved as if it were some unimaginable booty amassed by pirates disguised as greengrocers, when in fact it was simply that day’s pitiful takings, earned entirely for the benefit of their employer: the State. A pile of cash collapsed under its own weight, and like something in a silent film the coins rolled to the ground without a sound. They picked them up quickly and, using the tip of a knife taken from a hook on the wall, eased out those caught in cracks or swallowed up by holes hollowed out over time in the beaten earth of the floor.